break until i bend – part 3

It’s hardly the first time I’ve set foot in a recording studio. I’ve logged more hours in a studio than most people off the street. Having worked in music and advertising since the age of three, let’s just say that by now, I’m fairly comfortable with the studio environment. It may be one of my most favouritest places in the whole wide world.

But today was special. Today, it was about my music. The songs that have come out of my darkest and lightest, most public and most private, most joyous and most painful places. That’s what we’re starting to put on tape now. And that lights up my soul like nothing else.

Kid #2 spent a very patient day in the studio with me, listening to audiobooks, practicing typing (yeah, really!), and reading comic books. Only in the last 1/2 hour did she start to ask, “How much longer?” She even helped out, filming a bit so I could throw this episode of Behind the Mic together so y’all could see what the day looked like.

I’m in bliss. And today was mostly just scratch tracks. Imagine what will happen when we get to actually tracking the real shit!

(For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a scratch track is something that you record in order to facilitate other tracking. For instance, today we recorded a couple of piano tracks, a guitar track, and three vocal tracks. Out of all those, only one piano track will actually be used in the end. But the rest of the tracks are there so that Royce has a reference point while he’s building drum, bass, and guitar tracks for the 3 songs we’re starting with. In the end, we’ll “scratch” them, and re-record keeper tracks, once all the rest of the instrumentation is there. I always prefer to do vocals last, so the vibe of the whole song is there for me to hook into.)